5 Ways to Become a Millionaire In One Year

Some spend their entire lives struggling to earn a decent living, while actually managing a business meant to thrive. If you are tired of watching your competitors bypass you or tired of doubting your business idea, check out these simple, yet powerful tips to boost your profits today and join the list of millionaires next year!

1. Discover a growing market

One of the most obvious, yet forgotten, ways to create a business worth millions is to find a booming new trend and ride to the top of it. Analyze what’s hot right now. Spend time researching the niche and evaluate what competitors offer and what they don’t, and what you can! Take for instance, Nick D’Aloisio, a 17-year-old kid from London who coded a handy Iphone app Summly – a wise news aggregator collecting short news summaries from all major outlets. The app was bought by Yahoo within a few months for a whooping sum of £19 million. Whereas there already existed a huge amount of news apps on the market, none of them offered to pull out a summarized and concise list of all major events, based on your interests, location and preferences.

No wonder the app was hot to get acquired by Yahoo, as the possible revenue estimates were expected to double within a few years as more and more mobile users were getting tired of slow loading pages and clusters, opting for clean and neat products to let them solve their problems on the go.

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2. Think over your monetization strategy from day one

A lot of tech startups fail with this one and merely focus on growing a huge user base, instead of thinking about decent ways to monetize. Twitter and Instagram are just two examples of such a phenomenon, but there are numerous companies who eventually failed due to their inability of creating revenue. If you are focused on becoming a millionaire in the first year, you have to work over your monetization strategy from day one!

Most profitable businesses operate with one of these models – they sell a lot of cheap products and services to a lot of people or they sell premium, big-ticket items to a limited list of buyers. Brian Clark of Copyblogger managed to turn a simple blog into a $7 million company by selling premium marketing courses and software for internet entrepreneurs and content marketers. Whereas, online marketplaces like Etsy dominate the search engine rankings with a huge variety of products worth from a penny to a few hundred dollars.

Now each model may have its draws and advantages, but more importantly than choosing which one you are to implement, you first have to create a defined plan for monetization. Understanding how you will make money from the start will save you from wasting time on the idea that something profitable will come up for you.

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3. Be Number One

Now, Pepsi may earn a few billion dollars each year being number two product on the market, but chances are, you can repeat the same success are rather low. There is a bunch of mediocre products out there these days, but those companies are nowhere close to making a million in their first years. The truth is – you have to offer something so freaking great to wow your customers and create the necessary industry buzz if you want to succeed. For instance, John Morrow claims to offer best guest posting course that will connect you with top influencers in your niche, generate long-term traffic steam and actual sales. The spots get filled up within a few days after opening as the product seems to be one and only non-bullshit course these days that will teach you to grow your business with smart content marketing and guest blogging techniques.

If you are struggling to identify what exactly is going to make your product better, just ask around to your existing customers! A short survey with simple questions like “What else we can do for you?” and “What other features would you like our products to have?” will give you the lacking insights. And after implementing those recommendations, you will earn a bunch of loyal clients who will go on to refer more sales to you in the future.

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4. Hire Rock stars

You should not expect to handle a multi-million dollar business on your own, right? Delegating and hiring top-notch stuff is one the crucial points to make or break your company. Hiring underperformers is cheaper and easier, yet this team will achieve none of the goals a few high-end professionals could complete within the same time-frame. For instance, Google invested in hiring best coders since early days and keeps the same policy until now. It’s needless to say how powerful this strategy turned out to be.

When looking for the initial team for your business venue, the first thing to do is ask around your professional network for referrals and recommendations. Pay special attentions to the sales executives you are hiring, as they will stand the biggest difference in your business’s bottom line. Keep them motivated and inspired to close the deals with whatever it takes!

5. Focus on data

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The last, but not least, major point is to consume and analyze all data you can possibly get and act on it. Take advantage of Google Analytics by identifying and setting up your company’s key KPIs. Run split tests and implement new marketing strategies based on the data, in order to push the indicators even higher. Gain valuable statistics by analyzing your social media performance with KissMetricts or focus on improving your website usability with a series of tests by Crazy Egg. With numerous data analysis solutions out there, squeezing out the tiniest details about your possible consumers and audience has never been easier.

If you feel like you are lacking the skills, consider investing in a rock star analyst who will chew down all the numbers for you into actionable tips. If your goal is to manage a million dollar business, you need to take advantage of the markets data and act smarter on it that your competitors.

How to Set Financial Goals and Actually Meet Them

Finances can push anyone to the point of extreme anxiety and worry. Easier said than done, planning finances is not an egg meant for everyone’s basket. And that’s why most of us are often living pay check to pay check. But did anyone tell you that it is actually not a tough task to meet your financial goals?

In this article, we will explore ways on how to set financial goals and then actually meet them with ease.

Table of Contents

5 Steps to Set Financial Goals

Though setting financial goals might seem to be a daunting task but if one has the will and clarity of thought, it is rather easy. Try using these steps:

1. Be Clear About the Objectives

Any goal (let alone financial) without a clear objective is nothing more than a pipe dream. And this couldn’t be more true for financial matters.

It is often said that savings is nothing but deferred consumption. Therefore if you are saving today, then you should be crystal clear about what it is for. It could be anything like kid’s education, retirement, marriage, that dream vacation, fancy car etc.

Once the objective is clear, put a monetary value to that objective and the time frame. The important point at this step of goal setting is to list all the objectives, however small they may be, that you foresee in the future and put a value to it.

2. Keep Them Realistic

It’s good to be an optimistic person but being a pollyanna is not desirable. Similarly, while it might be a good thing to keep your financial goals a bit aggressive, going out of the line will definitely hurt your chances of achieving them.

It’s important that you keep your goals realistic in nature for it will help you stay the course and keep you motivated throughout the journey.

3. Account for Inflation

Ronald Reagan once said – “Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hitman”. And this quote sums up the best what inflation could do your financial goals.

Therefore account for inflation whenever you are putting a monetary value to a financial objective that is far away in the future.

For example, if one of your financial goal is your son’s college education, which is 15 years hence, then inflation would increase the monetary burden by more than 50% if inflation is mere 3%. So always account for inflation.

4. Short Term vs Long Term

Just like every calorie is not the same, the approach towards achieving every financial goal will not be the same. It is important to bifurcate goals in short term and long term.

As a rule of thumb, any financial goal, which is due in next 3 years should be termed as short term goal. Any longer duration goals are to be classified as long term goals. This bifurcation of goals into short term vs long term will help in choosing the right investment instrument to achieve them.

More on this later when we talk about how to achieve financial goals.

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5. To Each to His Own

The journey of setting financial goals is an individualistic affair i.e. your goals are your own goals and are determined by your want to achieve them. A lot of times we get on the bandwagon of goal setting only to realize later on that it was not meant for us.

It is important that your goals are actually your goals and not inspired by someone else. Take a hard look at this step at all the goals you’ve set for after this step, you will be on the way to achieve them.

By now, you would be ready with your financial goals, now it’s time to go all out and achieve them.

11 Ways to Achieve Your Financial Goals

Whenever we talk about chasing any financial goal, it is usually a 2 step process –

Ensuring healthy savings

Making smart investments

You will need to save enough; and invest those savings wisely so that they grow over a period of time to help you achieve goals. So let’s get down to ensuring healthy savings.

Ensuring Healthy Savings

Self realization is the best form of realisation and unless you decide what your current financial position is, you aren’t heading anywhere.

This is the focal point from where you start your journey of achieving financial goals.

1. Track Expenses

The first and the foremost thing to be done is to track your monthly expenses. Use any of the expense tracking mobile apps to record your expenses. Once you start doing it diligently, you would be surprised to see how small expenses add up to a sizeable amount.

Also categorize those expenses into different bucket so that you know which bucket is eating the most of your pay check. This record keeping will pave the way for cutting down on un-wanted expenses and pump up your savings rate.

2. Pay Yourself First

Generally, savings come after all the expenses have been taken care of. This is a classical mistake which almost everyone of us do. We pay ourselves last!

Ideally, this should be planned upside down. We should be paying ourselves first and then to the world i.e. we should be taking out the planned saving amount first and then manage all the expenses from the rest.

The best way to actually implement is to put the savings on automatic mode i.e. money flowing automatically into different financial instruments (for example – mutual funds, retirement corpus etc) every month.

Taking the automatic route will make us lose control of our money and hence will compel us to manage in what’s left with us thereby increasing the savings rate.

3. Make a Plan and Vow to Stick with It

Budgeting is the best to get around the uncertainty that financial plans always pose. Decide in advance how spending has to be made.

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Nowadays, several money management apps and wallets can help you do this automatically. It’s easy and who knows, you may just end up doing what people fail to do.

At first, you may not be able to stick to your plans completely but don’t let that become a reason why you stop budgeting entirely.

Make use of technology solutions you like. Explore options and alternatives that let you make use of the available wallet options and choose the one that suits you the most. In time, you will get accustomed to making use of these solutions.

You will find that they make it simpler for you to follow your plan, which would have been difficult otherwise.

4. Rise Again Even If You Fall

Let’s be realistic. It’s not like the world will come to an end if you made one mistake. This isn’t called leniency but discipline.

If you fail to meet your budget for a month, don’t give up the entire effort just like that. Instead, start again.

Remember that flexible plans are the most realistic plans. So go forward and try to follow your financial goals as planned but if for some reason, the plan gets out of hand for you, do not give up on it just yet. This has a lot to do with your psychology rather than any material commitment.

All you have to do is to stay on the road and vow to stay on it, no matter how much you fall down.

5. Make Savings a Habit and Not a Goal

In the book Nudge, authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein advocate that in order to achieve any goal, it should be broken down into habits since habits are more intuitive for people to adapt to.

Make Savings a habit rather than a goal. While it might seem to be counter intuitive to many but there are some deft ways of doing it. For example:

Always eat out (if at all) during weekdays rather than weekends. Usually weekends are expensive. Make it a habit and you would in turn be saving a great deal.

If you are travelling buff, try to travel during off season. Your outlay will be much less.

If you go out for shopping, always look out for coupons and see where can you get the best deal.

So the key point is to imbibe the action that results in savings rather than on the savings itself, which is the outcome. Focusing on the outcome will bring out the feeling of sacrifice which will be harder to sustain over a period of time.

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6. Talk About It

Sticking to the saving schedule (to achieve financial goals) is not an easy journey. There will be many distractions from those who are not aligned with your mission. And it would be rather easy to lose the grip over your discipline.

Therefore in order to stay the course, it is advisable that you keep yourself surrounded with people who are also on the same bandwagon. Daily discussions with them will keep you motivated to move forward.

7. Maintain a Journal

For some people, writing helps a great deal in making sure that they achieve what they plan.

So if you are one of them, maintain a proper journal, where you write down your goals and also jot down the extent to which you managed to meet them. This will help you in reviewing how far you have come and which goals you have met.

Use this journal to write down all essential points such as your short term, mid term and long term goals, your current sources of income, your regular expenses which you are aware of and any committed expenses which are of recurring nature.

When you have a written commitment on paper, you are going to feel more energised to follow the plan and stick to it. Moreover, it is going to be a lot more easier for you to follow you and track your progress.

At this point, you should be ready with your financial goals and would be doing brilliantly with savings; now it’s time to talk about the big daddy – Investments.

Making Smart Investments

Savings by themselves don’t take anyone too far. However savings when invested wisely can do wonders and we are at that stage where we will talk about making smart investments.

8. Consult a Financial Advisor

Investments doesn’t come naturally to most of us therefore rather than dabbling with it ourselves, it is wise to consult a financial advisor.

Talk to him/her about your financial goals and savings and then seek advice for the best investment instruments to achieve your goals.

9. Choose Your Investment Instrument Wisely

Though your financial advisor will suggest the best investment instruments, it doesn’t hurt to know a bit about them.

Just like “no one is born a criminal”, no investment instrument is bad or good. It is the application of that instrument that makes all the difference.

Do you remember we talked about bifurcating financial goals in short term and long term?

It is here where that classification will help.

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So as a general rule, for all your short term financial goals, choose an investment instrument that has debt nature for example fixed deposits, debt mutual funds etc. The reason for going for debt instruments is that chances of capital loss is less as compared to equity instruments.

10. Compounding Is the Eighth Wonder

Einstein once remarked about compounding,

Compound Interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it… He who doesn’t… Pays it.

So make friends with this wonder kid. And sooner you become friends with it, quicker you will reach closer to your financial goals.

Start investing early so that time is on your side to help you bear the fruits of compounding.

11. Measure, Measure, Measure

All of us do good when it comes to earning more per month but fail miserably when it comes to measuring the investments; taking stock of how our investments are doing.

If there is one single step where everything (so far) can go wrong, it is at this step – Measuring the Progress.

If we don’t measure the progress timely, then we would be shooting in the dark. We wouldn’t know if our saving rate is appropriate or not; whether financial advisor is doing a decent job; whether we are moving closer to our target or not.

Do measure everything. If you can’t measure it all yourself, ask your financial advisor to do it for you. But do it!

The Bottom Line

This completes the list of tips for you to set financial goals and actually achieve them with not so great difficulty.

As you can see, all it requires is discipline. But guess that’s the most difficult part!